Random Thoughts

You can talk with Falstaff now?!

It’s an outrage!

Book Club 2025: Vurt by Jeff Noon

I remember Jeff Noon being hot shit in the 90s — if I remember correctly, there were a whole bunch of die-hard fans on rec.arts.sf.written? Hm.

In any case, I stumbled upon two of his books in the 90s at a different sales (Pollen and this one). And I think I started to read this, but then bounced and put it back on the shelf? (Or that’s what I think I remember, at least. The 90s is, like, decades ago.)

But since I’m reading a bunch of late 90s books I bought on sale now, apparently (I didn’t plan to; it just happened), I thought I’d give it a go. If it horrible, I can just ditch it, of course.

It’s not horrible. It seems pretty interesting? I kinda like the style it’s written in — it’s very 1993; just dump chaos at the reader, and then pull back after a bit.

But… after reading 40 pages of this, I find that I’m just not interested, really. I’m not quite sure why — there’s fun bits, like the Coronation Street ingested as hallucinatory drugs (I think), but I just can’t be bothered, really. I guess I just don’t find drug/fantasy stuff all that compelling? It’s me, it’s not the book.

And since I’m ditching this book, I’m ditching the next one, too. (Heh, I see that I bought Vurt on a sale in 1995, apparently, and then Pollen at a sale in 97, so I guess these didn’t sell well, but the bookstore did their best to push them…)

Pollen starts off pretty swell, though.

Wow, there’s four books in the series:

Vurt (1993) by Jeff Noon (buy new, buy used, 4.04 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Strachey’s Folly by Richard Stevenson

This is the sixth Stevenson book I’ve read this year, and it’s also the final one for me, I think.

The first couple books were really witty (tons of repartee) and had fun and convoluted mysteries. But there’s been a downward trajectory on both parts, and with this one, there’s not much left to enjoy.

Like many authors who write jokey stuff, Stevenson continues to write in the same style, even if the jokes just aren’t there any more. Some people manage to keep the fun going over the years, but most don’t. But that’s not the worst problem: It’s like Stevenson has no idea what he’s going to write about, so you have endless conversations between the characters where they repeat to each other what we’ve just read, and trying to figure out what to do next.

And these scenes read like as if Stevenson is just trying to think aloud to figure out how he can develop the plot. It’s just tedious.

The ending is definitely the worst of all these books, so — I’m out. No more Stevenson for me.

Or at least I think so… It’s the lowest rated book in the series, so perhaps it picks up again? Hm…

Strachey’s Folly (1998) by Richard Stevenson (buy used, 3.78 on Goodreads)

10,000 Magazines About Comics

*gasp* The number of digits went up!

The vast majority of the magazines and fanzines about comics on kwakk.info are sourced from various, er, sources out there, but I was idly wondering a couple weeks ago whether it would be cheap to buy some of these magazines in bulk from ebay and do some scanning myself.

The answer is… yes and no. There are some really cheap lots of Comics Buyer’s Guide to be found, for instance, but there’s not a lot of them. Presumably because they’re so worthless, people don’t bother to even try to sell them — it’s not worth the bother.

And, really, the shipping costs dominate, so I’m not sure I’m going to repeat the experiment.

But I do think it’s kinda fun to do the actual scanning. Well, perhaps “fun” is the wrong word… But with my process, it’s something I can do totally mindlessly while watching TV and having a few beers. Or rather, lots of beers. So it’s like knitting, except that you can presumably not do knitting while drunk, but scanning magazines? No problem whatsoever.

I’ve got an A3 scanner, so I scan two pages at a time, and my throughput seems to be about ten seconds per two-page spread, so that’s *counts on fingers* about five seconds per page.

One new thing I had to do this time around — it wasn’t sufficient to have just a pedal as input unit to do scanning. (I stomp it to scan the next couple pages, because I have to use my hands to hold the magazine down on the scanner. (No, using the scanner lid would take 2x more time.))

But The Comics Buyer’s Guide has both runs of black and white and colour pages, so I had to have a convenient way to flip between the two modes (scanning in grayscale makes things crisper, so scanning in colour and then post-processing doesn’t give as good results). I remembered that I’d bought this single key USB “keyboard” for something else, but never used it, so I just glued it to the side of the scanner.

Efficiency!

So what did I scan?

A bunch of Wizards.

Scanning these Wizards from 2001-ish was fun — I was reminded of this colouring style, presumably developed specifically to highlight boobs. But applied to non-boob surfaces, with hilarious results.

With these (about a dozen issues), the Wizard search engine is almost complete.

I got some very old issues of The Nostalgia Journal (the magazine that turned into The Comics Journal when Fantagraphics bought it).

I also filled in some missing Comics Interview issues, and almost found myself reading some of them.

It’s a pretty interesting magazine, really.

But the big batch (which I’m not done with yet — I need another evening, I think) was The Comics Buyer’s Guide. kwakk.info only has about 10% of the issues, which is a shame, because it was a weekly magazine with a lot (I mean — a lot) of stuff.

I mean, not all of it’s … very deep.

And there’s pages and pages and pages of stuff like this, which I can’t imagine is very interesting even for historical reasons. Some issues are almost three hundred pages long! My god! Is this a good use of anybody’s time? I can see why people out there haven’t been very active in scanning these issues (besides people just throwing them away).

But there are articles that seem at least marginally worth preserving, so…

Anyway, as always — if you have scans of magazines/fanzines/catalogues about comics that aren’t listed here, drop me a note, and I’ll get them on the site.

(Note: No currently running magazines, and no comics magazines — just magazines/etc about comics.)

Record Label Samplers: This Is Reggae Music

OK, OK, this is the final post in this blog series for sure, and I mean it this time.

Is this a record label sampler? Well, yes and no. As far as I can tell, all the tracks here had been previously released by Island Records, and most of these acts were signed to Island Records.

But of course, Island Records didn’t just do reggae — they had a lot of prog and pop artists, too, and they’re not anywhere to be seen here.

I think for something to count as a “record label sampler”, the main idea should be to get people to buy the artists represented, and not sell the compilation itself, so to speak. And I think this was one of those; i.e., sold cheaply to boost sales of the “real” albums, but I’m not quite sure.

In any case, as an album, it’s great. It was released in 1974, and one of my older sisters had this album, so I listened to a lot as a child. And then I started listening to it again in 2017, and I see that I’ve listened to it 46 (!) times since then. That’s once every other month, for those of you without a University maths education.

There’s not a single bad track here — it’s all spiffy. It’s all “lighter” reggae music, I guess (I’m no expert) — the music has a very intimate, almost cosy feel to it. And the sequencing is perfect.

 03:08 Zap Pow - This Is Reggae Music
 04:43 The Wailers - I Shot The Sheriff
 02:55 Joe Higgs - The World Is Upside Down
 02:53 Jimmy Cliff - Hey Mr. Yesterday
 04:55 The Maytals - Funky Kingston
 03:14 Lorna Bennett - Breakfast In Bed
 03:44 The Maytals - Louie, Louie
 02:59 Owen Grey - Guava Jelly
 03:29 The Heptones - Book Of Rules
 04:08 The Wailers - Concrete Jungle

Full album: